The Good Place don’t mess around. From episode one, the show has been powered by crazy reveal after crazy reveal, with each new plot twist pushing the show’s cast of hell-bound misfits further out of their comfort zone. First we learned that the recently-deceased Eleanor (Kristen Bell) was in the Good Place by mistake, then we learned that Jason (Manny Jacinto) was also misplaced in heaven, then we learned that the Good Place was actually a prototype Bad Place constructed by actually-a-demon Michael (Ted Danson). That meant that Chidi (William Jackson Harper) and Tahani (Jameela Jamil) were also in the Bad Place. And then everyone got their memories wiped hundreds of time, Jason fell in love with the sentient Siri-esque being Janet (D’Arcy Carden) and Tahani, Janet developed a ton of human-ish emotions, Michael started taking ethics lessons and actually became less demon-y–listen, a lot happens on this show and it happens fast.

That’s why, yeah, it shouldn’t be surprising to learn that the show did another crazy thing again in tonight’s episode, titled “Best Self.” The episode doesn’t change the status quo of The Good Place so much as destroy it…literally.

At the end of “Best Self,” the “Good Place” that we’ve spent the first 23 episodes in is destroyed, completely and totally. Eleanor’s house? Gone. Tahani’s mansion? Gone. Every single pun-tastic restaurant? As if they never existed.

Photo: NBC

This was bound to happen eventually. The Good Place is not a show that stays in a status quo just because it wants to mine it for every every permutation of every idea possible. Other shows would have gotten 100 episodes out of the show’s initial premise (bad girl tries to hide out in heaven forever!). Not this show. By this point in The Good Place’s trajectory, there was nothing left but to destroy the world the show has been set in so far. Michael’s multi-layered gambit paid off and he successfully tricked his demon boss Shawn (Marc Evan Jackson), keeping his hundreds of failures and his allegiance shift under wraps. In last week’s episode “Leap To Faith,” all of Michael’s underlings partied one last time and left the fake town. In “Best Self,” our heroes said goodbye to the only afterlife they’ve known and committed to their mission of getting into the real Good Place. They boarded a train outta town and, as they left, the entire Good Place fell away piece-by-piece into blackness.

To prove just how big a deal this is, imagine Central Perk getting permanently turned into Starbucks. Imagine Cheers getting shut down for good in Season 2. Or in a real one-to-one mapping of what just happened, imagine all of San Francisco falling into a void as the Tanner family vehicle crossed the Golden Gate Bridge for a final time. Shows, particularly comedies, rely on the comforting repetition of a set. Comedies need some stability so the episode’s wacky changes can really pop, and on the best shows, the sets become their own character. The Dunder Mifflin office, the Pawnee parks department, Jerry’s apartment, we can visualize every single one of those sets. The same was true of The Good Place’s fake Good Place. Eleanor’s weird bedroom stairs, Jason’s Bud-hole, the quaint and cozy town square–these were all settings we could have easily spent seasons and seasons in. But nope, they’ve all been devoured by the relentless abyss!

Where The Good Place goes next is anybody’s guess, and that’s both literally and figuratively. The gang cannot go back to their home, as it’s no longer there, so they’ll have to find a new place to live. Will it be the train? A corner of the Bad Place? The actual Good Place? Or will they continue to jump from setting to setting, spending who-knows-how-long on the run? There’s really no way of predicting what’s going to happen because this show playfully defies all expectations. All we know for certain is that The Good Place is branching out into new territory in every way possible.